Literary

It’s back to school season, and thousands of young people in Nova Scotia are commencing degrees in the subjects their parents want them to study, or the ones they imagine will get them a good job—or just heading directionlessly to university because it’s the default option. Academic Laura Penny thinks it’s high time we looked […]

In “Part One: Echoes,” the Toronto-based Trinidadian-Canadian reconsiders how authors such as Guy de Maupassant, Jean Cocteau and Yasunari Kawabata have shaped him as reader and writer. Alexis traces these connections through a series of short stories, creating fictional worlds that combine his and his heroes’ spirits and sensibilities. “Mylène Saint-Brieuc (Henry James/Carlos Fuentes),” an […]

This book is inaccurately subtitled A Heavy Metal Memoir. More appropriate would be A History of My Substance Abuse (and other stories). Mustaine is incredibly long on sex and drugs, and short on rock ’n’ roll —Megadeth albums sadly provide a backdrop and timeline for depravity and failed rehab attempts. The narrative suffers from some […]

Be they glaringly misspelled words, foreign language translations gone wrong or the glaringly obvious punctuation errors, we as an English culture seem to enjoy poking fun at what is usually the consequence of being educationally or linguistically disadvantaged. In the sphere of books (or blogs) devoted to pointing these out—quotation marks gone awry are perhaps […]

Black Blizzard was published in Japan in 1956, leaving its mark on the emerging Japanese comic book industry with its longer narrative and adult-oriented story. The manga is like a Hitchcock film on paper: two convicts handcuffed together try to evade police in the middle of a snowstorm. The dated artwork looks a little too […]

Aliide Truu is an elderly woman living alone on a farmhouse in rural Estonia. When Zara, a “[m]uddy, ragged, and bedraggled” girl” fleeing her abusers hides on Aliide’s property, the two women intrinsically identify the other’s survival impulse and slowly recognize a shared history. The elder has survived historical occupation of her nation by Soviet […]

Quarterly magazine Contemporary Verse 2 is celebrating its 35th anniversary with a coast-to-coast tour, and it’s pulling up to the Halifax stop Sunday for an evening of readings from local poets Matt Robinson, Jeanette Lynes, Miki Fukuda and Sue Goyette. “I jumped at the chance,” says Robinson, explaining that CV2 contacted him as a former […]

Gus is a young boy with deer ears and antlers. He’s a hybrid—a child born with animal features after a great plague killed most of humanity. When Gus’ father dies, Gus ventures out into the world in search of a fabled haven for hybrids called “The Preserve.” What makes Sweet Tooth: Out of the Woods […]

In this suite of narrative poems published by Goose Lane, award-winning British Columbia poet Gary Geddes adds a dimension (of voice) to the Qingming Shanghe Tu scroll, an expansive and highly detailed 12th-century painting thought to be produced by Zhang Zeduan of Bianliang. The painting reproduced over several middle pages in the (8” x 5.5”) […]

Toronto comic artist Dave Lapp won acclaim for his first book, Drop-in; Children of the Atom collects his strips from the Vancouver weekly Georgia Straight, telling the stories of his two characters Franklin-Boy and Jim-Jam Girl. The two speak in riddles, playing and dancing a line between childhood and adulthood at varying times. Their discussions […]

The subtitle of Reid’s book sums up his timely story better than any review: “A Year in the Life of an Overeducated, Underemployed Twenty-Something Who Moves Back Home.” Reid takes a part-time summer gig at CBC Radio, but the only way he can afford to do it is to move back home to his parents’ […]

After penning two acclaimed novels, author Jonathan Safran Foer writes his first non-fiction account, Eating Animals on, well, not eating animals. After learning of his wife’s pregnancy, Foer, faced with health and moral implications of feeding his then-unborn son, began more than a year’s worth of research into factory farming and vegetarianism. You don’t have […]